Yeah, which is sad and in the end unnecessary but all the adverse publicity is likely to kill a very good airline.

I've flown MAS so many times and always been impeccable. The suggestion is they may try a re-launch next month in the budget market. Can't see it - Asia is full of budget carriers and in long-haul those two losses are going to haunt them for a long time.

It's in the end cultural, both in the way that they have mis-handled the tragedies and in the way they are wanting to recover, both just so damned wrong.

No one can really blame them for -17, a few tried but that air corridor was full of other airlines, they just drew the short straw. So long as 370 remains unresolved why the hell should the airline be the villain ? It's pretty unlikely that they are, they are just being made the scapegoat but seem helpless about helping themselves.

People have short memories, give me a list of Asian airlines and I can give a pretty good report on them because I've flown up there so much, SIA has been in the top two for years but until this debacle for MAS they were just as good. Cathay and Thai sit not too far below them, and surprisingly Garuda would not be far behind.

The real problems are the Korean airlines and JAL has a less than stellar record, don't get me started on Chinese carriers

I'd suggest Qantas as part of the region not get too smug, only a brilliant crew stopped them from being first to wreck a 380 and only a miracle will save them from the Irish git at the helm

It won't stop the conspiracy theorists though, now the question is why it was so "conveniently" washed up on the speck in the ocean that Reunion is.

The reality is that it is very probable that a lot more debris has washed up on the East coast of Africa but most of the people living there would either re-purpose anything useful or ignore it, probably not even being aware of the 370 saga.

The nature of currents is that certain places end up with lots of debris accumulation but it does sound sort of "convenient".Though even with totally random currents, the Indian Ocean has SFA in the way of islands if you ignore the boundaries, ie Indonesia, so anything drifting around on the surface would eventually wash up in one of not many places.

It'd be an interesting project for someone... if you had a log of current and wind data you never know.

Probably want to do the rubber duckie experiment to verify the methodology though. And even then what works for one object probably won't for another.

Actually, that said, marine dynamics work much the same as for aero. And you have a piece of debris that has highly predictable behaviour if faced in one direction but is effectively an esky lid if you rotate it 90 Degrees.

My conclusion - a dropped flaperon would probably give you the same chance of predictive tracking in that environment as an esky lid of the same size & composition.

It's interesting in as much as an amateur found this piece that seems definitely to be from a 777 and from the same side as the flaperon. The guy has been running a blog on -370.

Really makes you wonder if there has actually been much in the way of a serious search for debris anywhere on the land that surrounds the Indian Ocean or if all the effort is in the deep-sea search which so far has nothing and is to cease mid-year.

Some of the conspiracy theories are becoming bizarre, I had someone in all seriousness tell me this week that -370 and -17 were the same aircraft and it was all about killing the Freescale engineers on -370...

Look it up and prepare to go down the rabbit hole

Fortunately it does not compute, the Dutch rebuilt the -17 wreckage, it's a different model of 777 to what was operating -370.

Uni W.A. and Curtin seem to be competing to get the most accurate drift theory predictions from the Reunion and Mozambique debris to fine-tune the deep sea search. The overall conclusion is that where the ships are searching now is very high probability. The only catch is that it is a very difficult sea bed terrain to search, they have already lost one towed sonar and had to return to Fremantle to get replacement cable, apparently the tow literally ran into a sea mount.

Politically the search is supposed to end mid-year but there is increasing agitation to keep it going.

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